Chapter 1 - Five Blank Screens
The blistering Nevada sun beat down on the concrete firing line of the Apex National Precision Championship as five thousand spectators leaned forward in the tiered bleachers.
Above the manicured thousand-yard desert range, five gigantic high-definition LED scoreboards towered against the bright blue sky, tracking every millimeter of every shot in real time.
On Lane Eleven, three-time defending national champion Garrett Locke lowered his twenty-thousand-dollar prototype carbon-fiber rifle and grinned as the crowd roared with applause.
All five of Garrett's shots had clustered inside a two-inch bullseye at one thousand yards, posting a nearly unbeatable score of ninety-nine-point-eight on the giant monitors.
Garrett wiped his brow with a branded sponsor towel, turned toward the concrete bench at Lane Twelve, and smirked at the quiet woman standing beside a battered canvas gun case.
Her name on the walk-on registration sheet was Nora Vance, and she wore a faded gray cotton hoodie with the sleeves pushed up past her scarred forearms.
While every other finalist on the range wore custom ballistic visors, wind-reading telemetry wristwatches, and corporate logos, Nora carried an old, heavy steel bolt-action rifle that looked like it had been milled in a basement workshop.
"Hey, sweetheart, the amateur tin-can shoot is thirty miles back down the highway in Carson City," Garrett said loudly enough for the directional microphones on the firing line to pick up his voice and broadcast it across the VIP stands.
A wave of harsh laughter rippled through the sun-drenched bleachers as billionaire defense contractor Victor Blackthorne raised his champagne glass from the glass-walled luxury box overhead.
Nora did not flinch, look up, or acknowledge a single word of the mockery echoing across the concrete pad.
Moving with calm, mechanical precision, she lay prone on the scorching rubber mat, tucked the worn steel buttplate into the pocket of her shoulder, and closed her left eye.
She did not even glance at the spinning electronic wind flags fluttering across the desert floor between the firing line and the distant target berms.
"Look at her, she did not even dial her elevation turret for the crosswind," one of the television commentators chuckled into his headset as the thirty-second shot clock began to beep.
Nora rested her scarred index finger against the curved steel trigger, exhaled slowly through her parted lips, and pulled.
The thunderous crack of her heavy three-three-eight magnum echoed across the valley, and before the brass casing even finished rolling across the concrete, she worked the steel bolt and fired a second time.
Three more shots followed in rapid, blistering succession—five rounds fired in less than nine seconds flat, a pace considered suicidal at a distance of three thousand feet.
Up in the bleachers, the laughter died down for a second as five thousand pairs of eyes lifted toward the five giant electronic scoreboards mounted above Lane Twelve.
Screen One flashed once and went completely dark, registering a flat zero.
Screen Two blinked and stayed blank.
Within three seconds, Screen Three, Screen Four, and Screen Five all buzzed with error static and went pitch black, displaying five consecutive misses across the entire board.
For a heartbeat, the stadium was silent, and then the entire crowd erupted into deafening, hysterical laughter.
"Five complete air-balls on a four-foot target frame," Garrett howled, slapping his knee as spectators in the front row pointed and jeered at the woman in the gray hoodie.
Nora calmly opened the bolt of her rifle, engaged the manual safety, and stood up without showing a flicker of embarrassment or anger.
Behind the central control podium, however, sixty-year-old Chief Referee Arthur Miller was not laughing at all.
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Staring down at a hidden, hardwired diagnostic monitor recessed beneath his sunshield, Arthur watched every drop of blood drain from his own weathered face.
His trembling hand reached across the master console and slammed down on the red emergency range-freeze klaxon, cutting the crowd's laughter short with a deafening siren that stopped the entire championship cold.
